Several carriers in the US and UK are taking advantage of the preinstalled nano-SIM including EE on this side of the pond and AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile in the US with a selection of short-term data plans geared towards business travellers.

Choosing a data plan is simple and can be done by visiting the iOS Settings menu, navigating to Mobile Data and a list of the carriers that are available will be listed with more expected on board in the coming weeks and months.

Users that already have a carrier and nano-SIM can remove the Apple SIM at any time, although one researcher doesn’t think the arrival of Apple’s own offering will signal the end of the SIM card in favour of a virtual offerings.

"Despite all the speculation and hype we're nowhere near an iPhone with a virtual SIM that can be connected to any operator in the world," CSS Insight researcher Ben Wood told IB Times. "The technical and commercial complexity of a full voice and data subscription is very very different from a data-only SIM in a tablet. Let's not forget that operators will do absolutely everything in their power to resist it.”

Apple sneaked out the news of its Apple SIM during the launch of the iPad Air 2 last week and in addition to the new SIM card it also announced that Touch ID was making its arrival on the tablet range and as such Apple Pay now comes as part of the package.